I spent most of my life believing I was searching for love. I thought that if someone could finally see my worth, understand my heart, and choose me completely, something inside of me would settle, and I would stop questioning whether I was enough, because someone else would have finally convinced me that I was.
Come sit with me for a few minutes.
Looking back now, I realize I was never only searching for love. Underneath it I was searching for safety, and for the freedom to finally stop performing and just be a real person, and more than anything I was searching for the part of myself that had slowly disappeared beneath all those years of surviving instead of actually living.
For a long time I believed healing meant becoming someone new. I thought I had to fix myself, reinvent myself, or somehow become more worthy before I could ever have the life I wanted, and I spent years trying to turn into a different woman, never realizing that the woman I had been searching for had been with me the entire time.
Healing didn't hand me a new life overnight, and it certainly didn't erase my past. What it did was much quieter than that. It gently introduced me back to the person I had always been before fear ever convinced me I wasn't enough, and it reminded me that underneath the self doubt and the survival and the years of looking outside myself for answers, there was still a heart in me that had never once stopped hoping.
When I look back over the last few years, I don't see one defining moment that changed everything. I see hundreds of ordinary ones instead. The long walks where my thoughts finally began to untangle, the meditations that brought up tears I didn't even know I was still carrying, the quiet mornings when I chose compassion instead of criticism, and the hard days when I chose to keep going instead of giving up on myself. None of them felt like much at the time, but together they slowly became the path that led me home.
The love I had been searching for was never actually missing. It had only been buried beneath years of fear and survival and the belief that I had to earn what had always been mine, and I finally understood that healing was never about someone else choosing me. It was about me choosing myself, again and again, until it became the most natural thing I knew how to do.
I was searching for the little girl who learned how to survive long before she ever learned how to feel safe, and for the woman who slowly forgot she was already enough, and for the heart that kept hoping even after it had been hurt. Healing didn't give me a new heart. It simply brought me back to the one that had been there all along, patiently waiting for me to come home.
Coming home was never about arriving somewhere perfect, or waking up one morning to find every wound gone. It was about looking at my own reflection and finally recognizing the person looking back at me.
For so many years, I thought I was searching for love. Now I know I was only ever finding my way home.
With love,
Zenfull Heart
Soul Messages by Sherry
